More Reasons To Stop Smoking

What Smoking can do to your Looks

Smoking affects your looks, with smokers having paler skin and more wrinkles. This happens because smoking reduces the blood supply to the skin and lowers levels of vitamins A and C in the body.

Tobacco smoking affects your body’s internal organs, especially the heart and lungs, but it also affects your appearance by altering the skin and body weight.

These changes may not be life threatening in the way that heart and lung disease are but they can increase the risk of other serious disorders and have a noticeable ageing effect on the outward appearance of the body.

The skin is affected by tobacco smoke in two ways. The first being the smoke released into the environment has a drying effect on your skin’s surface. The second way the skin is affected happens because smoking restricts the blood vessels and reduces the amount of blood that flows to the skin. This depletes the skin of oxygen and other essential nutrients.

Another explanation for smokers appearing more wrinkled than non-smokers is that they ‘squint’ in response to the irritating nature of the smoke getting into their eyes, and ‘pucker’ the mouth when drawing on a cigarette thus resulting in wrinkles around the eyes and mouth.

The more a person smokes the more risk of developing premature wrinkles. Recent research suggests that the ageing effects on the skin by smoking may be due to an increase in the production of an enzyme that breaks down collagen in the skin. Collagen helps to maintain the skin’s elasticity

Smokers in their 40s will often have as many facial wrinkles as non-smokers who are in their 60s. The good news is that a South Korean study of smokers, non-smokers and ex-smokers aged between 20 to 69 found that, although current smokers had a higher degree of facial wrinkling than non-smokers, ex-smokers who had started smoking at a young age but managed to quit had fewer facial wrinkles than current smokers.

Long term and heavy smokers may find that the skin of the fingers and the fingernails on the hand they use to smoke become discolored. Smoking can also cause the teeth to become yellow in color and is a cause of bad breath. 

Compared to non-smokers, people who smoke are more likely to develop psoriasis, a chronic skin condition which, although not life-threatening, can be very uncomfortable and disfiguring.

The risk seems to be more common among women than men and appears to be more likely to occur in people who have been smoking over longer periods of time. Smoking may be responsible for as many as one quarter of all psoriasis cases.

How Does Smoking Affect Your Weight?

When people stop smoking, they often put on weight. This is often a cause for concern, particularly among women who want to quit. The average weight gain seems to be around 6-11 pounds however this may be temporary.  

There could be a number of reasons for this weight gain including:

• Smoking increases the body's metabolic rate; that is the rate at which calories are burned up. When a person stops smoking their metabolic rate returns to normal and appears to the smoker to have slowed down.

• Nicotine acts as an appetite suppressant so when a person quits their appetite increases and results in an increases in calorie intake.  

• Smoking may alter the body-weight set point; that is the weight towards which a person tends to always return despite attempts to gain or lose weight.  Smoking seems to lower a person’s normal weight and any weight gained after stopping reflects a return to the body’s natural weight set point.

Weight gain is common immediately after a person stops smoking, but in the longer term ex-smokers weight may return to the same weight as someone who has never smoked.

Smoking can also affect your ability to reproduce . . .

How Smoking Affects Men

For men in their 30’s and 40’s smoking can increase the risk of erectile dysfunction by about 50%. Erection is unable to happen unless blood can flow freely into the penis.

Smoking can damage blood vessels and cause them to deteriorate because nicotine narrows the arteries that lead to the penis and reduces the flow and pressure of the blood in the penis.

This narrowing effect increases over time, so although a person may not have immediate problems, they could develop over time.

Erection problems in smokers could be an early warning signal that cigarettes are already damaging other areas of the body with more serious consequences, for example the blood vessels that supply the heart.

How Smoking Affects Women

Women who smoke often take longer to conceive, with the chances of conceiving amongst smokers falling by 10-40% per cycle. The more a woman smokes the longer she is likely to take to conceive.

What does Smoking do to other people?

There are many sound health-related reasons to give up smoking, and not just for yourself; but to also to protect those around you.

Babies born to mothers who smoke when pregnant are twice as likely to be born prematurely and with a low birth weight.

Children who grow up in homes where one or both parents smoke have twice the risk of developing asthma and asthmatic bronchitis. They are also at higher risk of developing allergies. Children under two years old are also more prone to severe respiratory infections and cot death.

For adults, passive smoking does seem to increase the risk of developing lung cancer but the evidence for an increased risk of heart disease is as yet unproven.